ence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through
his working hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every
incident of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit
of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has
plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail
had its significance, and the rapture of recovery was embittered to
Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been
pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that,
but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on
in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him
with her blood....

That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to
the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was
hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into
silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he
was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind
as possible; but he was always forgetting that she was there. Her full
bright presence, through which the currents of life flowed so warmly,
had grown as tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her--

Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be
looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.

"Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I'd left it on this
table." He said nothing, and she went on: "You haven't seen it?"

"No," he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.

His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he
looked up he met her tentative gaze. "I was reading an article in it--a
review of Mrs. Aubyn's letters," she added, slowly, with her deep,
deliberate blush.

Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish
that she would not speak the other woman's name; nothing else seemed to
matter. "You seem to do a lot of reading," he said.

She still earnestly confronted him. "I was keeping this for you--I
thought it might interest you," she said, with an air of gentle
insistence.

He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the
review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.

"I haven't time for such things," he said, indifferently. As he moved to
the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then